How To Re-Vitalise Your Life

How to get unstuck and rekindle joy and passion...

A year ago, I took up ceramics. In a very experimental way. I had little belief that there was much artistry inside me after years of giving myself the message, “I can’t draw”. Has anyone out there had a similar experience?

Here’s what happened.

Transcript

Hello well-being family,

Lovely to be back with you.

I'm talking about a subject very dear to my heart,

I mean every time I'm on this podcast I'm talking about something dear to my heart,

That's why I make the podcast because I get to actually talk about things that I find really inspiring.

I hope this finds you really well,

We are having absolutely lovely weather where I live and it's such a delight to wake up and see the sun streaming through the windows.

I always give thanks for where I live and how beautiful the weather is and how beautiful the nature is here.

Today what I want to talk about is getting unstuck because a lot of my clients,

It seems to be a very common issue,

Many of my clients talk about how they feel stuck and I think in midlife that's not an uncommon thing that,

You know,

I think Dan Siegel says that adults can learn a lot from adolescence because in adult life we can get very boring and you know adolescents are always trying new things and they're social and they're out there doing different things whereas adult life can actually start to feel very much like a,

You know,

That it's hard work,

That it's heavy,

That there's inertia and so today what I'm talking about is how I have worked with that sense of inertia in my own life because at the age of 62 I have certainly felt inertia and certainly doing the same work for many many years for me led to a sense of inertia and I had to revolutionize my entire working life.

That doesn't have to be the case,

Right,

And what I actually wanted to talk about today was the things that I've done outside of work that have helped me to bring back vitality and vibrancy and novelty and experimentation into my life so that I have had a sense of really feeling that I've used all of who I can be and my partner and I always have this joke that if we want time to slow down we just need to do new things.

It's when we're doing the same things over and over and over,

Going to the same beach,

Taking,

You know,

Going to the same cafe,

Taking the same route when we drive somewhere,

That life can become a bit grey and dull and boring and I don't know about you but I live in Brisbane and sometimes I'll take a different route somewhere and I see parts of the city I've never seen before even though I feel like I know this city like the back of my hand but I love it when I discover that there are new areas,

Different shops,

Different people,

A whole different vibe.

It's very exciting.

Actually it was one of the nice things about living in London that London is like a series of villages and each one has its own specific vibe.

You go up to Hampstead,

It's different from Brixton and that's different from Islington and you can really change the vibe by just going to a different part of the city.

So the thing that I've done most recently which has been my really huge experiment has been ceramics but over the last 10 years I've taken up many different things.

I've done acting classes,

I have done a lot of singing in different forms so I've been in different choirs,

A number of different choirs and I've also done an advanced harmony workshop over a year which was super fun.

I've learned human design which is this kind of really weird out there thing that when I heard about it I just needed to know more.

I don't even know how I'm going to use it in my work but I love knowing about it and I did a two-year course in human design.

So just off the top of my head those are some of the things that I've engaged in in the past little while on top of you know the business coaching and learning how to run a business,

Learning how to be an entrepreneur,

Reading endless books about you know how to use social media and how to streamline a business and get processes set up etc etc and I've worked with a lot of coaches as well and I've learned a lot of things about these experiments but what I really want to talk about is the ceramics because it's the most recent thing and it's probably the thing that I've dived into most intentionally.

It's also the thing that I probably had the most reticence about because I grew up in a family that was extremely artistic.

My mother and my brother,

Well my brother is an artist,

He spent his entire life being an artist and my mother was extremely artistic.

She made batik,

She sculpted in ceramic,

She painted,

She turned her hand to many different things and I somehow got this message pretty early on at school that I couldn't draw and I remember really vividly drawing a cow and the teacher giving me some comment about how cows aren't green and I just,

Something inside of me died but I'm sure many of you can relate to this.

I hear this a lot when I do sing it when I teach singing on retreats that people are very uncertain about their voices because some teacher a long time ago told them not to sing in the choir,

To just mouth the words right and you know those comments,

It's crazy isn't it,

Like a comment like that I think I had that comment about my drawing of a cow when I was about eight years old and it still informs the way I think about myself.

Talk about a fixed belief right,

Talk about taking on board an experience,

Turning it into a fixed belief and then repeating that belief to myself over and over and over and over so that it builds so much momentum and then it's a struggle to fight back from that place right.

So I have had this thing,

This belief that I'm not a visual artist right,

I'm the musical one and they're the visual artists.

I don't know how to take photographs properly,

I can't draw,

My sense of colour,

My sense of arrangement,

None of that is you know up to scratch.

So doing visual art felt like a really big ask for me,

A really big ask and of course this is what we do right,

We play to our strengths.

I'm good at music,

Well I'll just stay in the musical sphere right but actually visual art offers a very different thing and so I've kind of challenged myself and I was very interested in clay because of its three dimensionality.

Like I know that painting and drawing,

Like I actually have,

I did a painting class and a creativity class with a beautiful coach last year and I actually had a lot of fun painting but it's not the thing that I'm most drawn to.

So I started at a community studio where we literally all just turn up with a bit of clay and you can do whatever you want and there's lots of people and they're all doing different things so you can get inspired by the things that you see which is what I did.

I would walk around the studio and I'd see something and I think I'm gonna try to make that and then I might ask some help from someone or some advice about how to do it.

And you know the process that I went through,

It's been so interesting to reflect on it and the reason that I'm recording this podcast today is that I was at the studio on Saturday and a group of us had gone to the Museum of Brisbane to see this beautiful ceramics exhibition which is on.

And the exhibition is in three parts so they've got a beautiful exhibition of some very well-known Australian ceramicists,

So Gwyn Hansen,

Piggott,

Carl McConnell and a couple of other people and then they've got six emerging ceramic artists on display and the other thing that's going on is that they sent out a call-out earlier this year for all ceramicists in Brisbane to submit what they called a memory vessel and they've displayed these memory vessels and at the time they sent out the call-out everyone was you know getting their vessel ready and all I could think was I'm not an artist,

I can't enter this,

I have no idea what a memory vessel is,

I didn't put one in.

So it was really lovely to go in and see these all these beautiful vessels,

The variety of things that people made and also all the beautiful work of the ceramic artists and what happened for me was that I felt really inspired and really excited and it was lovely to see the beauty of these things and really top up that aesthetic sense and then I had lunch with my friends and I had a really lovely time and then I came home and I noticed that I felt really not very happy,

That I you know there was something really bugging me that I my mood was just dropping like like like the mercury on a cold day right and I couldn't figure out what it was and I took myself for a walk and I just felt antsy and and then as I kind of inquired into myself and just gave myself a bit of time to reflect I realized that I was feeling that I was feeling disheartened that I would never be able to create these beautiful things that it was just too hard I didn't have it in me I certainly didn't have that kind of like it was the old story re-emerging right for another little go at me the old story re-emerging for another little go and it was just so interesting to realize that and then to start slowly unhooking myself from the story and to start talking to myself in a really a kinder way that I don't know what I'm capable of doing and I'm just at the beginning of my journey and there's so much to learn and anyway it's about being excited and expanded it's not about the outcome like I just changed the the conversation in my head but I just thought it was really interesting and I wanted to do a podcast episode about it and so on Saturday we were back at the studio and I was reporting what had happened to me and and I said something about because I'm not an artist and there was this chorus in the studio of yes you are an artist we're all artists right and I thought that's so interesting like again there's another layer it's almost like we're I'm excavating my belief system I'm excavating all these beliefs that I've had right doctors can't be lawyers doctors are doctors and I'm musical and I'm a doctor and I'm not an artist right and it just doesn't feel comfortable to describe myself as an artist like I'm smiling and laughing as I record this because I just think it's it's such a beautiful insight into the way my mind works and I know it's not just my mind right so my invitation to you is to think about you know where do you have really fixed beliefs about yourself where have you shut yourself down where have you created inertia and got stuck and where would you like to build some momentum to actually create more vitality like what I know about this is that when you step outside of the fixed beliefs the negativity the limiting smallness of our thinking anything's possible really anything almost anything is possible right and that you don't know until you try it right your mind certainly doesn't know until you put pen to paper until you get a piece of clay in your hand until you allow yourself to get excited and move beyond the story in your mind you really have no idea but what I do know is that it is an injection of vitality and energy and excitement and it's like color comes back time slows down life becomes exciting you wake up excited it's a very interesting journey so I really want to invite you to think about where you can experiment where you would like to experiment in your life because experimentation it's one of the pillars of gestalt therapy experimentation allows us to open to something new right and a lot of that feeling of being stuck feeling dull feeling lack of energy is because we're just living out this pattern that we've been with for decades right and if you want to re-energize yourself and bring color back into your life experimenting is the way forward so happy experimenting enjoy yourself I'll see you next time

Reviews

I've been a chemistry teacher for 20 years. 2 years ago I went back to school for music. I still do this to myself. The kids in my class are musicians who treat me like a musician. I treat them like musicians. I treat myself like it's take your daughter to work day and I'm up in the spectator section watching mommy do brain surgery. The kids help me with this, but it's a process. Thanks for putting a spotlight on it. It makes me feel less like I'm uniquely neurotic and more like if I keep at it, I'll get somewhere :)